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s for There are some voices that nothing can silence — not even death.

These voices grow stronger over the years, so powerful and triumphant that they become part of our internal soundtrack.

It has been 45 years since Martin Luther King Jr., died — and 50 years since he delivered what has come to be known as the “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington.

As with all great communicators — and moralists — his words carry meaning beyond the moment they were first uttered.

Wednesday is the 50th anniversary of the march, the day approximately 250,000 people stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., many of them wilting in the fierce heat.

But the blazing sun was nothing, for King would show all those thousands what true fire is.

“I say to you, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream,” he told the crowd. “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'”

If you were alive back then, even if you never got closer to Washington, D.C., than the TV set, you probably got chills hearing those words — words that resonate just as powerfully now as they did then. It was a different time, a time when violence seemed the norm, both at home and abroad. People demanded — and ultimately received — the civil rights that should have been their birthright.

A year after the speech, President Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark legislation, the Civil Rights Act. It ended racial segregation in schools, workplaces and “public accommodations.” And it created a mechanism to bolster the voting rights of African-Americans and other minorities.

It was not easy. There were riots and shootings, marches and demonstrations. And there was that speech, delivered by a man who confronted violence with non-violence — and hate with love.

“It was a testament to the power of nonviolent resistance,” Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who was in the crowd that day, said during a panel discussion on civil rights last year.

The speech awakened Congress, spurring politicians to enact a law that should have been passed years, centuries, earlier. But it did not change all attitudes, not completely, and that is why the words — and the dream they described — are as meaningful and resonant now as they were 50 years ago. The struggle continues today, as evidenced by the controversy over the recent Supreme Court ruling on the Voting Rights Act.

“We've made great progress,” Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP, told the Associated Press recently. “Progress has always been stop-and-start, and sometimes back up. We're in a holding pattern right now.”

That may be true. But America is better off for that speech and that march.

The speech was one event, one tile in the giant mosaic that was the civil rights movement. It would be foolish to suggest that a single speech could trigger all the good that followed — including the sweeping legislation that would attempt to safeguard the precious voting rights of African-Americans and others. And, yet, it was hugely important, for it captured, in one transcendent, crystalline moment, all the pain and turmoil and, yes, hope that led the United States to that intersection with history.

“... when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: 'Free at last, Free at last, Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.'”